French Paper Offices Bombed Over A Joke

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Catholics and Protestants waged bloody war replete with hair-raising atrocities on each other over the issue of whose reading of the Scriptures was more righteous, on and off, for something like a round century. All it led to was mutual exhaustion and nobody halfway sane bothering anymore. (Instead they settled for persecuting minorities inside their own territories and producing mean, petty satire about each other.)

While that's true, in broad strokes, but the "war" continued, it was simply the secular states that were exhausted, the doctors in the universities continued to fight it out, hence the aforementioned pamphlets, but all that ink and rags didn't make any difference either. The crucial point is that the situation didn't change until the two sides sat down and had civilised debates at the start of the twentieth century. Rational dialogue, not ridicule, changed how people felt and thought.

And the point stands, Catholics moved in to suppress the spread of a Lutheranism which was ridiculing the state of the Church by pointing out the fallacies of their thesis and their degenerate morals. The Catholics did everything in their power to stop militarily a war of ideas. It is what established religion always does to protect itself against ridicule. It cannot fight, as Mark Twain asserted when he wrote the quip I quoted on the previous page, truth-revealing ridicule with reason.

Reason is the best weapon for fighting anything, so your second sentence makes no sense. As to the first part, the military campaigns were extremely late in the day. By the time of the thirty years war both Wyclif and Huss had been condemned and Luthor and Calvin were loose upon the world. The cat was so far out of the bag it had died of extreme old age, and so had all it kittens, after having huge families of their own. As to the violent internal reactions - they were extreme because of the internal politics of the time.

But ridicule can mean either.



Yes. Why not?

A right to ridicule involves a right to do any number of stupid, mean spirited, cruel things that it isn't right to do. There's a difference between legal or natural rights and moral right.

Well in my country I can't, and I also can't ridicule individuals or I can be sued for slander and defamation of character.

This is exactly right, PVC you shouldn't ignore "fair field".

Most (all?) world religion have been ridiculed in pretty much every "field" and it hasn't made one iota of difference.